In 2017, the Gallery commissioned renowned artist, Vernon Ah Kee, to create a portrait of his late father, Merv, for the Gallery’s exhibition, Portrait of my father, that also included portraits of the artist’s two sons. The commission was completed during an artist-in-residency in Cairns and was acquired for the Gallery Collection.

Ah Kee is represented in the Gallery’s online First Nations Research Archive developed as part of the Gallery’s online Legacy Archive produced to celebrate the Gallery’s 30th anniversary.

Ah Kee was born in Innisfail, south of Cairns, in 1967 and is a member of the Kuku Yalandji, Waanji, Yidinji and Gugu Yimithirr peoples. He spent his childhood years in Innisfail and teenage years in Cairns, before moving to Brisbane to complete his Bachelor of Visual Arts and then Doctorate in Visual Arts at the Queensland College of Art.

His father Merv, tragically died in a car accident in 2014. Like his father, and mother Margaret, Ah Kee is a passionate advocate for Indigenous rights and education. In 2004, Ah Kee became a founding member of proppaNOW, a collective of Aboriginal artists in Brisbane that were determined to give a voice to urban-based Aboriginal artists.

Ah Kee had begun a longstanding preoccupation with portraiture by 2006, with a series of large-scale, hand-drawn family portraits. He represented his grandfather in both a profile and a frontal view, reflecting the practices of the anthropologist Norman B. Tindale (1900-93) who photographed Aboriginal people between the 1920s and the early 1960s. Tindale’s ‘anthropological’ portraits were rendered with the assumption that Aboriginal people would ‘die out quietly’. But Ah Kee’s multi-generational family portraits assert the continuation of an Aboriginal presence, in drawings variously described as ‘elegant’, ‘sumptuous’ and ‘conveying a sense of beauty’.

The Gallery’s commissioned portrait depicts Ah Kee’s father gazing out of the drawing, directly engaging the viewer. While in his studio in Cairns, he worked from photographs of his father, a process that he described as ‘a labour of love’ which he shared with his mother who sat quietly watching her son at work.

The Portrait of my father exhibition was the first time that Merv Ah Kee my father had been exhibited and represents the first drawing by this important artist in the Gallery’s Collection.

While in Cairns for the for the residency, Ah Kee worked in a studio space provided by the TAFE North Queensland campus and gave a free public talk about his work that was recorded by James Cook University and is available on the Gallery’s website.